A Hangout That Caters To a Crowd From Space

By JIM YARDLEY

Published: November 26, 2000

WEBSTER, Tex.—
For anyone unmoved by sentiment, the Outpost Tavern might not seem worth saving. The old red building is practically falling down. A tangle of bushes growing up an outside wall seems ready to swallow the place. Outside, there is a faint smell of sewage.

But push inside through the swinging doors shaped like two bikini-clad women and sentiment clearly rules the day. Every neighborhood bar has regulars, but the Outpost's neighborhood is NASA and the nearby Johnson Space Center. The walls are lined with photographs of smiling, blue-suited astronauts, not sports stars. Many of the people who come to nurse beers and trade gossip are the engineers, technicians and private contractors who help send people into space. Astronauts drop by, too.

''It's like a second home for a lot of people,'' said Larry Keyser, who served as assistant flight director on Apollo 13, as he sipped a tap beer from a mug commemorating a space shuttle mission.

For a space program dependent on cutting-edge technology, the Outpost is a decidedly low-tech watering hole, so much so that the local fire marshal recently came close to shutting the place down. The building is constructed partly from a wooden World War II barracks, and the marshal determined that the outdated grill on which thousands of Outpost burgers had been cooked was a fire hazard. So he ordered the grill closed.

No grill meant no lunch crowd, which meant more debts for the bar's owners, Stan and Sharon Aden. They bought the place four years ago from the estate of its fabled proprietor, Gene Ross, with the modest business plan of keeping it going for the faithful and breaking even at the cash register. But competition from newer bars and restaurants had cut into business, and the loss of the lunch crowd was seemingly a fatal blow.

So in late September the Adens convened a meeting of regulars to deliver a blunt message.

''I told them we were going to close it down on Oct. 27,'' Sharon Aden said.

Years ago, she substituted as an Outpost waitress when her daughter had pneumonia; she never left. The thought of closing distressed her, but building a new grill meant pouring at least $10,000 into a place already losing money.

What she had not anticipated was the reaction at the meeting that night. Regulars like Mr. Keyser vowed to keep the Outpost open. Word quickly spread through the NASA community. A ''Save the Outpost'' Web site was born. Roger Mitchell, a friend of the Adens' and a NASA employee, took charge of a fund-raising campaign as donations began pouring in.

''It's sort of a human space flight tradition,'' said Bob Crippen, commander of the first space shuttle mission, who stopped by the Outpost in October when visiting NASA for an annual checkup.

The building, just off NASA Road One, had known different incarnations when Gene Ross opened it as the Outpost Tavern in 1981. According to lore, George Abbey, now director of the Johnson Space Center, stopped by for a beer not long after it opened. Mr. Abbey was then head of flight operations, and Mr. Ross remarked that he could use some photos of astronauts to spruce up the place. Mr. Abbey sent over a box of pictures, and soon the astronauts themselves began to show up.

''As the shuttle program started to ramp up in the early 1980's, more and more people came into the Outpost,'' said Mr. Mitchell, the bar's unofficial historian. ''It kind of became the astronaut hangout.''

It became a tradition for shuttle crews to buy a keg of beer and hold parties before a mission and after a safe landing. There are also parties when crews or promotions are announced; the most recent was for the crew of the shuttle scheduled to be launched in February.

The Outpost became such a part of NASA lore that scenes from three movies have been shot there, most recently ''Space Cowboys.'' Engineers have been seen scribbling on napkins, trying to work out problems that had eluded them at work.

''There is no Building 99 in NASA, but this was given the official designation of Building 99,'' Mr. Keyser said. ''When someone said, 'Where are we going to debrief?' the answer was Building 99.''

The walls are practically a history of the shuttle program. One wall is lined with photographs of the crew of the Challenger, which exploded in 1986; the explosion was treated here like a death in the family. Other walls have photographs of Eileen M. Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle crew, and William M. Shepherd, the American commander on board the international space station.

''I'm a space geek,'' Mr. Mitchell admitted without shame as he showed off the bar. ''We're all space geeks here. You kind of have to be.''

For now, the faithful seem to have saved the Outpost. More than $9,000 was raised, including donations from astronauts, enough to build a new grill. The grill reopened, and people hungry for the brick-sized Outpost burgers began trickling back in.

''I have been overwhelmed,'' Ms. Aden said.

Everyone realizes that the future remains uncertain for the Outpost. It sits on a very expensive piece of real estate in a rapidly developing commercial corridor. Other repairs are still needed; the bathroom floors give a little, and the air-conditioning does not place a premium on cooling.

But for now, the bar has survived, largely unchanged, to the relief of its faithful.

''It looks just like I remember it looking in the early 80's,'' said Mr. Crippen, the former shuttle commander, who is now president of Thiokol, a maker of rocket propulsion systems. ''I think every once in a while they move the pool table.''

Photos: The Outpost in Webster, Tex., a watering hole for astronauts and workers at the nearby Johnson Space Center, was rescued from closing with the support of NASA veterans like Larry Keyser, second from right. (Photographs by Phillippe Diederich for The New York Times)